Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

One of the most melancholy things in the world is the enormous power for evil of the dead over the living. There is hardly a great painter or writer, or a man who had achieved greatness in any direction, whose name has not been used to repress rising genius.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?

Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion is socially powerful only so far as it has custom on its side.

The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

Among the many advantages of experience, one of the most valuable is that we come to know the range of our own powers, and if we are wise we keep contentedly within them.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the an who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.